Author: Sophi Kravitz

Hackaday teamed up with the Vintage Computer Festival to have a Meetup last week. It was quite a party, with Berlin based chiptunes band Thunder.Bird and TheRyk using Commodore 64s and SID sound chip. The age of this equipment and relatively small volume original production runs makes it hard to find these days, but there is an underground group making music with these who trade among themselves. TheRyk created PlayEm64 (pictured above) to organize and play the music using the SID hardware and says that an advantage of this software is that it includes the play time (not in the fileheader), which is really useful for party entertainment! These chips sounded fantastic and added to the energy of the packed house.

A Hackaday party means that people bring their projects to show off and entertain the crowd with. [Nils Dagsson Moskopp] brought a game called Zoo Tycoon Roguelikethat he built for a 7 day long competition. This is a text based roguelike game based on the 2011 Microsoft game Zoo Tycoon. As with the original game, Nils’ game aimed to keep animals happy within a thriving zoo. What’s neat about Nils’ version is that all the actions are displayed in words on the right side of the screen and he custom developed the characters in bitmap form.

[Sisam] brought Cube Tetris, a social gaming device with 4 sides, each individually controlled so that players must collaborate with each other to win. The new take on the already addictive game kept a crowd around this table the entire night.

[Dave Darko] and [Alex] brought a collaborative project that they’ve been developing on Hackaday.io together. The first, third and 4th board shown below are [Alex’s] boards, and the second one with the acrylic case is [Dave Darko’s]. They both started with 5x5cm breakout boards for the ESP8266 but they’ve been adding features off of each other’s boards like support for the ESP-07 / ESP-12 and an additional ESP-01 footprint. Someone wished for a USB micro port, and that is now on both of their boards. The next stage for [Alex] is adding 2 pin rows for GVS (ground-voltage-signal) to his boards, a feature which [Dave Darko] has already put in place on his offerings.

This weekend in Berlin, Germany, there are at least two events happening and [Sophi], [Elliot] and [Bilke] are going to check them all out. The Vintage Computing Festival is one of the big events, and it looks like there will be lots of geeky magic to play with. This weekend is also Maker Faire Berlin where we’re looking forward to hanging out with our friends from Hackaday.io and we’re excited about meeting new people and projects.

Hackaday often throws a party after Maker Faire to celebrate all of our community projects and we’re doing it again Saturday night. We are co-hosting a party with the Vintage Computing Festival, on the same site as the festival, and all are welcome. We’ll have drinks and snacks, and the VCF has live music planned for the evening. This event is free, but we’d like you to RSVP so we know how many refreshments are needed.

Your first drink is on us, and naturally, if you bring a project,your second one is on us too! Please help spread the word by telling your friends, sharing on social media, and mobilizing all the people at your Hackerspace. See you on Saturday!

When my Swiss cousin-in-law sent us her wedding invitation, I didn’t immediately think I’d get to see Hackaday.io user [antti.lukats‘] tiny FPGA projects as part of the deal. I’m really glad that I came to Switzerland for the wedding, and also got to be a part of an awesome meetup in Zurich’s Fablab. [Antti], who was at the meetup, is pictured above holding a small tube full of FPGAs, he’s a Hackaday Prize Best Product finalist with FPGA project DIPSY.

As is becoming the norm for Hackaday meetups, we ask people to bring projects. We then count all the people who want to present something and squeeze all the presentations into just about 90 minutes. Before and after the lightening talks, there’s always plenty of time to walk around and see individual projects, meet people and of course eat and drink.

There were 3 walking robots and 2 rolling robots presented. [Arian’s] Roomba had the popular ESP8266 hacked into it. [Simon] brought a RaspberryPi powered rolling robot. [Thomas] brought a walking robot which walked quite well. The last walking robot of the night was shown just on video. [Radomir Dopieralski] brought his Hackaday Prize entry, the very cool and easy to use Tote robot. The Tote aims to fix the problem the world has without enough walking robots by creating an easy platform to build walking robots upon. It seemed at this meetup, that [Radomir’s] dream of many walking robots had been found.

Last robot of the night

Thomas’ walking robot

Radomir’s Tote robot

#3 barely lives on

[Oscarv] brought the insanely cool PiDP. The PiDP-8/I is another Hackaday Prize Best Product finalist, it’s a replica of the first minicomputer. [Oscar’s] version uses a Raspberry Pi to recreate all the operations. [Neil’s] SoftVGA is a software only VGA generator. I expect to see many more cool projects like these two next week at the Vintage Computing Festival in Berlin. I’ll be there with [Elliot] and [Bilke] and we’re having a Meetup with the VCF folks Oct 3rd.

PiDP-8/I

SoftVGA

[tamberg] presented a beautifully fabricated clear cube with switches on the inside, a metal ball rolls around and activates the switches. The Larson scanner next to it was designed by [stefan-xp]. [Yvonne] discussed her recent light painting “Topology of Light” and [Isaac] was sick of playing 4 in a row alone, so he built a robot to play the game with!

@tamberg’s clear cube

@stefan-xp’s Larson scanner

Topology of Light

Isaac’s 4 in a row robot

A popular hacker project is automatic watering of indoor or outdoor gardens. [Effi] nailed it with a brilliant presentation about moisture sensors while showing us how well her plants are doing.

There were far too many projects to list everything here, but [Thibault‘s] Bit Shift project really caught my eye. This project has several panels daisy chained together with layers of blue thermochromatic pigment on top of white primer.Each panel is a PCB, a heat pad controlled in a timed heating sequence powered by ATtinys. After each panel heats up, there is a 20 second delay before the next panel heats up. When the blue thermochromatic pigment reaches 37°c it turns transparent, and the white undercoating shows through. As the square cools down, the transparent pigment turns blue again. You can catch the video here.

Join us for a Meetup Thursday the 24th of September in Zürich, Switzerland. We’re co-hosting a meetup with FabLab Zürich and we are excited to see you!

Doors open at 18:00 on Thursday, 24 September. We’ll have some food and drink, project show and tell, and time to hang out and get to know each other. This is a free event but please RSVP to let us know you’re coming.

Bring the project you are working on to show off, everyone loves to see projects regardless of what stage they’re in. Many times, showing your project and talking about it pushes your project forward; “oh hey, I have an extra RN42 BT module you can have” or “I already wrote a driver for that chip and it’s on github”. Showing your project to others can also inspire someone else to make their own project based on your awesome idea. I’ve been motivated many times to start a project because of what I saw someone else make.

Germany Too!

This Zurich meetup isn’t the only chance to connect with Hackaday in Europe. Next week, we’ll be in Berlin! We’re co-hosting a Berlin Meetup with Vintage Computer Festival organizers in the evening after Berlin Maker Faire and the Vintage Computing Festival. VCF have planned food and drink, a live band or two… chip tunes! It will be on October 3rd, and [Elliot], [Sophi] and [Bilke] will all be there.

I entered the Hackaday Prize in 2014. I entered because Hackaday editor [Brian Benchoff] persuaded me to. I ran into Brian at the HOPE conference in NYC and he told me that there were about only 800 entries to compete against.

I didn’t enter until a day or two before the deadline, which is where we are today. The deadline for this year’s 2015 Hackaday Prize is on Monday. Again there are around 800 entries to compete against.

When I entered the competition last year I never dreamed that I’d be managing the same contest this year. I didn’t know much about contests, and I certainly never thought that the odds of winning anything were very good. It is very easy to talk yourself into thinking that everyone else’s project has a better chance of winning.

So now that I’m working in it, I see all of the entries every day, I talk to all of you daily about your projects (which is an awesome part of my life, thank you!) and I can tell you that everyone else’s project does not have a better chance of winning than yours.

Best Product Has Crazy Good Odds

New to the 2015 Hackaday Prize we added a Best Product category. The Best Product is meant to encourage that small window of opportunity between project prototype and product. We ask that products entered into this category get 3 copies of that product to us before we close entries on Monday. Three copies means that you can duplicate your product, but you still may not yet be in a place where you can turn that into a company.

The crazy thing is that we haven’t received so many entries for this, and the prize for Best Product, besides keeping you in the running for the main Hackaday Prize, is $100,000 and 6 months free rent in the Supplyframe Design Lab. This is a recipe for a successful business start.

The odds are insanely good this time around. For Best Product so far, we’ve got under 100 entries. This means you have a 1 in under 100 chance of winning $100,000. For the main Hackaday Prize, we’ve got under 1000 entries and 5 prizes, so you have a 5 in 1000 chance of winning some portion of $500,000 in cash or prizes.

How do you make sure you’re actually in the running? You complete the requirements! Make your project logs, your cell phone video and your system diagram. You can do this in under a day, so make it happen!

Why Enter?

Last year’s Hackaday Prize theme was to “design a connected device” so we upped the bar a little this year. Actually, we upped the bar a lot with a theme of “design a solution to an important problem”. We want you to come up with ideas that have the potential to help a lot of people. We want you to not only think about winning money and trips to space, but to think about others. We gave away stuff — lots of stuff — during the contest to encourage those ideas. I think we all won with that.

We started Hack Chats weekly for the past couple of months and I’ve seen people get job offers, collaborate and start new projects from those chats. So, come to the Hack Chats, get your Prize entries in and use your smarts to effect change!

Canada! Just in time for Spring to hit. I went to Toronto to speak at FITC, an arts and technology conference, co-host a Hackaday meetup with HackLab TO, visit the DigiPlaySpace at TIFF, and to check out Globacore’s new digs.

FITC is a conference which celebrates the creativity in technology. Pictured above is Diorama Rama designed by [Christopher Lewis] and [Creative Technologists of Toronto] and built over 4 days by participants at FITC. The buildings are laser cut paper, and participants create a simple circuit using an ATtiny. A message is coded into the chip in ASCII and the buildings blink an individual message back in Morse code, each building blinking a different message. It’s pretty interesting to use a Morse –> ASCII phone app (Morse Tools) to read the messages.

Looking at Diorama Rama with Morse Tools

Hackaday Prize judge [Micah Elizabeth Scott] gave a talk about her work. [Jessica Rosenkrantz] of Nervous System spoke about her company’s process when designing mathematically based objects. She spoke about her 3D printed dress pictured below and how it was made. Amazing! I also got to show off my newly minted Breathe project at FITC.

Kinematics by Nervous System

After FITC ended, HackLab co-hosted a meetup with us. A team from HackLab was a 2014 Hackaday Prize Semifinalist and won $1000 in components with their Retro Populator, a Pick and Place machine retrofit onto a 3D printer. We had beer as well as almond-cream flavored non-alcoholic drinks from the Luma Droid, a drink mixing robot. HackLab is a good-sized hackerspace, with a huge room for a meetup, a full kitchen and vegan dinner served frequently, plus a shop tools room all by itself.

Eric Boyd kicks it off

Luma Droid!

3D router

Retro Populator

Full house at HackLab

Among the lightning talks, [Pearl Chen] brought her Intel Edison-powered alarm clock that has but one function — to tell her when she is running late. [Johannes van der Horst] brought a USB current monitor that had many of us fascinated for about an hour at the end of the evening, plugging in a phone or a battery just to see the numbers climb. [Eric Boyd] talked about the DIY Bio projects that are going on at HackLab. They are testing meat using PCR to see if it is indeed, beef. Ew.

[Andrew Kilpatrick] of Kilpatrick Audio showed us an older version of his synthesizer before showing us his newest revision, Phenol, which looks pretty slick.

Pearl Chen

Johannes van der Horst’s USB current meter

Johannes van der Horst’s USB current meter

Pearl Chen’s smart clock

Andrew Kilpatrick’s Phenol synth

[Hugh Elliot] spoke about a light-photography project. [Leif Bloomquist] spoke about a gaming glove project that Hackaday had previously covered. Leif had a Commodore 64 with him and all the games on it fit into 1 GB! [Nadine Lessio] discussed how many programs claim that you can become an expert in a few hours, but in fact, things are not easy. [Jay Vaidya] showed us an IFTTT hack which controls heaters and AC. [Andy Forest] showed us an impressive interactive model of Ontario’s power system that kids at Steam Labs created.

Nadine Lessio

Leif Bloomquist’s gaming glove

IFTTT hack

That was a super fun meetup! Thanks HackLab for hosting. We’ve got a bunch of upcoming meetups and larger events in LA, NYC, Bangalore, San Francisco and Shenzhen. Check our events page for what, where, and when, We’d love to see you.

I stopped by TIFF’s Bell Lightbox to see the DigiPlaySpace exhibit. [Micah Scott] did a collaboration with Ryerson University’s RTA School of Media which welcomes you as you walk in. Note: all photos are lifted directly from TIFF.net’s website.

Headrush

Forest

Alien

My final stop on this tour was to visit Globacore’s new offices. We spent a day or so hacking on a VR controller for their newest game called Power Cube. Power Cube is an Oculus Rift experience with a custom game controller holding an accelerometer, a gyroscope and magnetometer that links into the game directly.

The Hackaday Prize was about to launch but the date wasn’t public yet. I decided to do a pre-launch tour to visit a few places and to drop in on some of the Hackaday Prize Judges. It started in Chicagoland, looped through San Francisco for a hardware meetup and Hardware Con, then finished with visits to [Ben Krasnow’s] workshop, [Elecia White’s] studio, and the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

The Prize is now running and it’s time for you to enter. Look at some of the awesome hacking going on at the places I visited and then submit your own idea to get your entry started. Join me after the break for all the details of the adventure.